When the game came out back in 2024 it barely surpassed 1000 players on steam, eventually the servers were shut down a fortnight after it was released: so the game didn’t even last that long. Development costs were not cheap either, since Sony invested $400,000,000 into the project for it to fall apart upon release, talk about a waste of investors money. Have you played it at the time? If so, what made it a shit game that’s forgotten?
Alternative theory: launching a free to play game in any genre these days may as well be buying an extremely expensive lottery ticket. The top 10 charts in player numbers, not just on Steam but on any platform, are entrenched games that have been out for 10+ years and perhaps Valorant. It takes a lot of players to financially sustain a free to play game, and without the price tag, they would have only burned through money faster. When the game was free pre-release, it had already proven that there was no interest in the game. 2XKO was one of the most popular fighting games out there by player numbers, but for what it needed to make that make financial sense, it was nowhere close. Highguard was free to play and had a tremendous amount of players at launch, but it barely lasted longer than Concord.
I didn’t say free to play would have saved it. It was destined for failure either way. I said that it failed as hard as it did because they decided to charge for it.